Stop Spreading Spam

     Many people do not truly understand how to properly send e-mail. Sure it seems simple enough, but do you realize that every e-mail that you send has the potential for adding the name of the person to whom you are sending the e-mail to, be added to the list that spammers use to target their victims? 

     Whenever you are sending an e-mail to more than one person you should put your e-mail address in the To: box and all your receipients names in the BCC: box . The Bcc or Blind Carbon Copy box means that everyones e-mail will be hidden from every reipient except the person recieving it. This protects people that recive your e-mail in as a forwarded e-mail. For example, when you e-mail a joke or interesting comment, a plea for charity etc, to several of your frinds and your friends forward your original e-mail to their friends eventually this huge list of e-mail addresses will be harvested by a spammer. Placing the recipients e-maill addresses in the BCC box makes it more difficult for spam bots to harvest the e-mail addresess.

Second: One very common method used by spammers to reap large numbers of e-mail addresses is to start a petetion. They will send an e-mail to someone asking them to "Join The Cause" for one thing or another and add their e-mail address to the list and forward it all their friends who will add their e-mail address to the list and forward it to their friends. This pyramid scheme of sorts will quickly mushroom into a very, very large list of e-mail addresses. The last step in this scheme is a link in the original e-mail to phoney e-mail addresses purported to be going to the intended reciever of the list such as Whitehouse. gov or Editor@nytimes, etc. but the e-mail link actually goes to the owner of the spam list. Never add your e-mail address to a petition list and forward it to your friends. At the least you should reserach the link to see where it actually goes or just google the the intended recipient of your e-mail and get their true e-mail addess, then as I said before, put everyones e-mail address in a Bcc

    Whenever you post an e-mail address in a public forum don't put the @ sign in the e-mail addresses. Spam bots search these sites and use the @  to automatically detect the e-mail address. Instead use the human word for the @ sign and the . such as Fred AT FredKahn dot com. This makes it much more difficult for the spam bots to detect the e-mail addess.

You can also use programs such as Safe E-Mail Links Scout which generates spam-bot safe HTML code for e-mail links using inline javascript.